Rethinking History & Home

By Jodi Farrell

Two Miami-based artists lead us into a new arts season this fall. Haitian-born Edouard Duval-Carrié imagines colonial-New World encounters with a contemporary eye through 37 new paintings and sculptures. His solo exhibition, Metamorphosis, turns the mundane magical at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in North Miami, where one of the gallery rooms recreates his studio in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood. Karen Rifas, a former teacher at New World School of the Arts and the University of Miami, where she earned her MFA, experiments with color and composition in PER FORMS, her solo exhibit at Emerson Dorsch’s new space in Little Haiti. Her vivid new paintings on paper create “impossible space” with flat geometric forms and color. Portland-based sculptor Aaron T Stephan pulls into town with a one-man, concrete block-making device from the early 1900s to construct Cement Houses and How to Build Them at Locust Projects. The active exhibit builds dialogue about the American dream of home ownership, the U.S. housing market collapse and recent housing booms in cities like Miami. Using original blueprints packaged with the historic machine from Sears, Stephan produces hundreds of blocks to build the façade of a home. The historic convergence of high art and popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s plays out at Lowe Art Museum with Pop Art Prints, an exhibit of 37 prints from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s permanent collection. The installation includes works by Allan D’Arcangelo, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann. It’s a great reminder of how we got here.